Finally, I rendered the image in .rpf file format and checked the Z depth check box so that I could apply depth of field later on in After Effects (Fig.78).

Fig. 78

Â I rendered one pass for the character and the bed, and another pass for the room and props. I did that to avoid bad antialiasing, and other artifacts, that tend to appear after applying DOF with .rpf file format.

Compositing

As I mentioned before, I used Adobe "After Effects" to composite the final image. In "After Effects" I opened the room render pass in a new composition and duplicated it three times; the first layer (bottom one) remained the same, then on the middle layer I applied a "Gaussian blur" effect. On the last layer I applied the "Extract 3D Channel" effect and set it to Z-Depth, then I changed the black point and white point to get the right balance. The middle layer uses the first layer as a Track Matte, set to "Luma Inverted Matte", and the breakdown of the layers can be seen in Fig.79.

Fig. 79

Final Image

Well, that's about it. I hope this will be interesting and helpful for you. I enjoyed making this article and I must thank you all for reading it. If you have any questions, comments, criticism or anything else that you want to share with me, please send me an e-mail and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible.